It is possible to make a textile product hemmed on all its edges completely automatically by cutting and transversely conveying a continuous textile web hemmed on its longitudinal edges and wound on or stored in a goods or fabric roll on a beam and feeding the cut pieces for further working such as hemming on the cut edges by sewing machines. The quality requirements for certain special textile products have greatly increased of late so that the manufacturing processes used up to now have often been unsatisfactory.
Furthermore large numbers of pieces of these products must be made according by economical methods of manufacture in a completely automatic process in many cases. This is for instance the case in the mass production of hand or dish towels. The apparatus for performing this process must be very long because of the large width of the goods and/or because several textile fabric webs are processed side-by-side.
According to the known process a textile web drawn from a web-carrying beam on which the roll of the web is coiled is fed transversely to a longitudinal conveyor and cut to form the desired pieces. The textile web can have reinforced or selvedged edges on its long sides, e.g. a woven edge, a seam or border, a glued edge or a stitched or knitted or selvage seam according to requirements. After cutting, hemming operations must be performed on both cut sides in the new longitudinal feed direction.
The process known up to now and the machines for performing it often do not operate satisfactorily, especially at high speed and in completely automatic operation. They have a high degree of waste and are unreliable.